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Lauren Groff is perhaps most known for her best-selling third novel, “Fates and Furies,” which President Barack Obama named his favorite book of 2015, but she has also developed a devoted audience for her short stories. In those compressed works, she manages to tackle great themes—grief, parenthood, violence toward women and the meaning of safety, how we imagine our lives turning out, and how those imagined futures weave themselves into reality in surprising ways. Groff’s latest collection, “Brawler,” comes out next week. Not long ago, she joined us to discuss some of her favorite writers of short fiction. Her remarks have been edited and condensed.

Complete Stories

by Clarice Lispector

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Lispector was born in Ukraine in 1920. Her family fled the pogroms when she was a baby, eventually settling in Brazil. As an adult, she moved around a lot because her husband was a diplomat. And I think she’s a genius. There’s just nobody who writes like her. Her writing plays according to very strong internal rules—the aesthetic is really regulated and, in many ways, sui generis. I just love her so much.

Lispector wrote a lot about women. Many of her stories are about the internal space within women’s psyches, and the way that they encounter the world as they go about their lives. She wrote about the world as we know it, but in such a slantwise way that it becomes surreal. They convey her vision of the world, which was extraordinarily strange. I also think that, because of her background, she always felt like a bit of an outsider. You can tell this from her work: even though she’s writing from within the center, in a way, her perspective is a few steps outside of it.

The Diving Pool

by Yoko Ogawa

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This book is three novellas—I think that might still fall under the rubric of “short story.” Ogawa is another surrealist, in some ways, and these stories are really disturbing—almost on the brink of horror. They’re really about evil itself. “The Diving Pool,” the one the collection is named after, haunts me. I think about it all the time. Another, “Pregnancy Diary,” actually first appeared in The New Yorker. Ogawa’s writing—at least, as translated by Stephen Snyder—is made up of these relatively simple sentences, but the cumulative effect is hypnotic.

The Visiting Privilege

by Joy Williams

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I talk about Williams all the time, because I think she is a great master. Her brain is just so weird and magnificent and wondrous.

These stories span her career, so you see the way her work progresses through time. There are some new stories toward the end.

What I love most about Williams is the way that she will break a sentence to surprise you. Again, like Lispector, she has her own internal logic. She has an internal view of the world that is so clear to her that, when you finish reading her stories, you also start to walk through the world in the way that she does.

Counternarratives

by John Keene

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This is a masterpiece—one of the best short-story/novella collections written by an American in the past fifty years, I think. I just love Keene’s voice and how he subverts American history. The book is quite experimental, taking preëxisting structures and transforming them in ways that really speak to the underlying stories that he’s trying to tell. One way the book approaches history is by unfolding across different places and examining the past of each of them. The first story, for example, is called “Mannahatta,” and it’s about the beginning of Manhattan. There’s another story titled “Gloss on a History of Roman Catholics in the Early American Republic, 1790-1825; or the Strange History of Our Lady of the Sorrows.” I think that kind of detail speaks to the book’s playfulness, singing back to things in the canon, like “Moby-Dick.”

Forty Stories

by Anton Chekhov

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He’s the source, right? I try to read him once a year, just to go back to his way of thinking about the world. Chekhov had such profound empathy for every single one of his characters, and when I go back to him I try to glean something from that—the lack of judgment, the clarity of vision.

The New Yorker staff writer Jon Lee Anderson and the contributor Andy Kroll have been named 2025 winners of Polk Awards, among the highest honors in journalism. Anderson received the Sydney Schanberg Prize for his reporting on decades of war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where regional and global actors have fuelled one of the world’s most vicious entrenched conflicts. Kroll, a reporter at ProPublica, was recognized for a profile of Russell Vought, an architect of Project 2025 who has used his latest role, as the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, to hobble government agencies, decimate the federal workforce, and expand President Trump’s powers in ways that challenge the Constitution.

Anderson, who has written for The New Yorker since 1998, travelled twice to Congo, and to neighboring Rwanda, in order to report his article. As many as six million soldiers and civilians have been killed during Congo’s thirty-year conflict—by violence, displacement, disease, and famine—and yet the fighting “seldom makes the international news,” Anderson notes. The article combines deep historical context with up-to-the-minute developments, taking in the legacies of colonialism and slavery while also explicating contemporary factors in the bloodshed, including ethnic rivalries, international competition over resources, and diplomatic maneuvers by the Trump Administration. To give voice to Congolese citizens, Anderson spoke with figures ranging from rebel leaders to medical personnel, from a regional king to an elderly woman tending subsistence crops in a cemetery. Anderson’s reporting vividly refutes Trump’s claim to have “stopped” the conflict, while also showing the risks and the potential significance of an eventual resolution. “Many of the people I talked with in Congo wished fervently for a new way of life but seemed barely able to conceive of one,” Anderson observes.

Kroll received the Polk Award for political reporting, for a comprehensive and often alarming portrait of Vought, one of the most significant figures behind Trump’s dismantling of federal agencies and consolidation of Presidential power. The profile, co-published with ProPublica, charts Vought’s unlikely rise from backstage technocrat to the highest levels of influence within Trump’s orbit. Regarded by opponents and allies alike as “a master of the arcane rules that can get legislation passed,” Vought has wielded his expertise to bring about sweeping changes that eluded Trump in his first term, altering the country’s legal landscape and transforming the relationship between American citizens and their government.

The Polk Awards, which will be handed out at a ceremony on April 10th, preserve the memory of George Polk, a CBS journalist who was killed in 1948 as he reported on a civil war in Greece. James Baldwin won the first Polk to recognize a piece in The New Yorker, for “Letter from a Region in My Mind.” The magazine’s writers and editors have now received a total of thirty Polk Awards. ♦

In February, a pop-up science column, Annals of Inquiry, is appearing in place of Kyle Chayka’s column, Infinite Scroll. Chayka will return in March.

When Joanne Osmond was growing up, in rural Pennsylvania, her family had two nighttime rules: you had to stay in your room, and you had to be quiet. There was no rule that you had to be asleep—which was fortunate, because Osmond, her three brothers, and her two sisters rarely were. Osmond stayed up late reading novels from her school library. Her sisters loved solving crossword puzzles. Even her father, an engineer, tinkered with television sets late at night and early in the morning. Only Osmond’s mother, for whom the rules had been created, routinely got what she considered a full night’s sleep.

Osmond, her siblings, and her father were what scientists call natural short sleepers. Some people don’t sleep enough because they have insomnia, or work a night shift; they tend to struggle with exhaustion, cognitive impairment, and even long-term health issues, such as elevated rates of depression and a higher risk of heart attack. But short sleepers, who make up less than one per cent of the population, spend significantly less time snoozing without any apparent health consequences. “Growing up, we didn’t realize that there was anything different about us,” Osmond told me. Only in 2011 did she learn that she has a genetic variation linked to short sleep. Her sisters, who were tested in 2019, have variations in the same gene. Osmond, now seventy-seven, sleeps no more than four hours a night.

My curiosity about short sleepers was piqued after several of my friends (not for the first time) made New Year’s resolutions to sleep better. Sleep was also on my mind. I have never had insomnia, but in my late teens and twenties I bartended while going to school, and sleep felt like a luxury that I could opt out of if needed. When I became a journalist, a cup of strong black tea helped me start writing at four-thirty or 5 A.M.—my most productive time—before spending a full day at the office. As I enter my mid-thirties, however, I often start writing after sunrise, and caffeine has lost its power to reinvigorate me. When I’m sleep-deprived, my mind feels like hard leather: unpliant, easily creased under stress.

If you’ve ever wondered what you could do with a few more hours in the day, Osmond suggests an answer. A rough calculation suggests that she has been conscious for thirteen years longer than her average peer from elementary school. She has certainly made use of the time: she went to college for engineering, married an engineer, had five children, in the suburbs of Chicago, and worked demanding jobs in technology and management. While her husband was asleep, she studied educational policy, eventually becoming president of the Illinois Association of School Boards. During one of our conversations, she told me that, after I went to bed, she’d be teaching students from around the globe how to start their own businesses. “The world seems to need eight hours, and I don’t,” she told me. I felt a warm stirring of envy in my gut.

Ying-Hui Fu, a human geneticist at U.C.S.F. who has studied about a hundred short sleepers, told me that they raise fascinating questions about the nature of sleep. She is sometimes asked why short sleepers are so rare: wouldn’t evolution reward individuals who spend less of their lives unconscious? But she speculates that such a trait only became prized in modern times. “Before electricity, there was no advantage to being a short sleeper in darkness,” she said. Fu’s work also suggests a connection between our sleep needs and the ways we fill our days. Many of the people she’s studied are drawn to demanding jobs and intensive hobbies. They often have a high tolerance for pain. Many don’t need to drink tea or coffee, and they don’t get jet lag. “I call them Homo sapiens 2.0,” Fu joked. Perhaps the deepest mystery is how short sleepers thrive on so little rest—and whether anyone else might ever be able to do the same.

Most animals need sleep, but it’s difficult to say exactly why. One leading theory is that sleep replenishes energy that’s stored in brain cells. Another postulates that sleep removes waste from the brain. Still another says that sleep allows us to consolidate memories from the preceding day. If sleep’s purpose is elusive, so is the number of hours the job requires. Bats sleep eighteen to twenty hours a day, while wild elephants sleep just two hours a night. In humans, eight hours is dogma—“My body needs eight,” Fu told me—but our actual sleep requirements depend in large part on genetics.

What we know for certain is that terrible things happen when animals stop sleeping entirely. In 1894, a Russian doctor deprived some puppies of food and others of sleep. The sleep-deprived died within days, but the hungry survived. The Guinness Book of Records no longer accepts entries for the longest time a human can stay awake, citing “inherent dangers associated with sleep deprivation.” Most of us have the opposite ambition: we have become so fixated on sleep amount and quality that sleep books spend months on best-seller lists, and the market for trackers such as Oura and Whoop is valued in the billions of dollars. There is even a modern affliction called orthosomnia, described by one scientific article as “the obsessive pursuit of optimal sleep metrics.” Tragically, it may lead to poor sleep.

Sleep is orchestrated by two systems. The first is the so-called biological clock, which runs the body on a roughly twenty-four-hour cycle of sleeping and wakefulness. We all have slightly different circadian rhythms, which explains why some people (larks) get up early and others (night owls) stay up late. The second system is the homeostatic drive for sleep: the longer you are awake, the tireder you get. One’s circadian rhythm and one’s drive for sleep usually work in tandem, but they can fall out of step, Amita Sehgal, a chronobiologist and an investigator at the University of Pennsylvania’s Howard Hughes Medical Institute, told me. When you’re badly sleep-deprived, you want to go to bed no matter what time it is. (Our reactions to sleep deprivation seem to have a genetic basis, too: after thirty-eight hours awake, identical twins, who are born with identical DNA, performed more similarly on tests of reflexes and alertness than nonidentical twins did.)

People with extreme sleep patterns first became a focus of genetic research in the nineties, after a neurologist at the University of Utah, Chris Jones, met a woman who regularly went to sleep in the early evening and woke up in the middle of the night. Her granddaughter had the same sleep patterns, and Jones had a hunch that their habits might be explained by DNA. He got in touch with Louis Ptácek, a neurogeneticist at U.C.S.F., who helped him identify a DNA mutation that seemed to play a role. Fu joined Ptácek’s research team in 1997. “I was very good at finding mutations,” she told me.

In response to the team’s findings—some of the first on how DNA influences sleep—thousands of people reached out. Many had irregular bedtimes and wake times but slept a consistent number of hours per night. An exceedingly small number, Fu said, went to bed very late and woke up very early. Curiously, they didn’t have the complaints that people with insomnia or other sleep disorders often do. In 2009, after studying a mother and a daughter who were both short sleepers, Fu published a paper about a variation in a gene called DEC2, which influences the production of orexin, a hormone associated with wakefulness. (Orexin deficiency is one of the main causes of narcolepsy.) When Fu bred mice with the same mutation, they slept less than other mice.

Since 2009, Fu and her colleagues have published research on six mutations across five genes linked to reduced sleep needs. (A few more genes are being researched, Fu told me.) Osmond and her sisters have variations on a gene that affects receptors for glutamate, an excitatory neurotransmitter with many functions throughout the brain. A different mutation was found in a father and a son in 2019; when Fu’s team introduced it into mice, the animals didn’t show memory deficits that usually appear in sleep-deprived mice.

Sehgal, who has studied sleep in fruit flies, and who was not involved in Fu’s research, was intrigued by the fact that these genes do not seem to be connected by a particular sleep process or brain pathway. “It’s not one specific thing that stands out,” she said. Mehdi Tafti, a neurophysiologist and a geneticist, said that the unsolved mystery of short sleepers reveals our ignorance about how sleep works. When he looked for DEC2 mutations in hundreds of patients with irregular sleep patterns, he couldn’t find any. Fu believes that short sleepers have developed different ways of sleeping efficiently. Sehgal offered a different explanation: maybe their bodies don’t accumulate as much damage while awake.

In theory, the genetic mutations associated with short sleep—and the pathways they seem to affect—could point to targets for drugs that would safely reduce our sleep needs. The discovery that orexin is linked to narcolepsy has sparked new pharmaceutical research, and last year an experimental orexin-blocking medication showed promise for insomnia in a clinical trial. Experimental drugs increasing orexin may also help people with narcolepsy stay awake longer. But it will be more challenging to develop a drug that transforms us into Osmonds. Fu said that, by finding short sleepers and then backtracking to single mutations, she may be missing out on other, more subtle genetic factors. When scientists scoured samples from nearly two hundred thousand people, in the U.K. Biobank, those mutations alone weren’t associated with extreme sleep patterns. And sleep is so important that Fu would want drug developers to proceed with caution. “The worst thing is, you come up with a drug and have horrible side effects,” she said. “You sleep less, but then, five years later, you get Alzheimer’s.”

We fantasize about getting by with less sleep, Tafti said, because the twin goals of sleeping well and sleeping enough are more elusive than they sound. Good sleep hygiene—things like going to bed and waking up at the same time every day—requires us to set boundaries in our work and family responsibilities. It asks us to make choices that are prudent, but not very fun: leaving a party early, cutting back on alcohol, refraining from late-night snacks and screen time. Of course we’d rather take a pill than do all of that. Unfortunately, Tafti said, “we cannot dissolve the need for sleep.” At one time, clinicians hoped that central-nervous-system stimulants such as modafinil could help us sleep less without consequences, but they were wrong. (Like caffeine, wakefulness drugs suppress sleepiness; they don’t eliminate it.) Maybe the next best thing is to find out for yourself how long you need to sleep. One way to do that, according to the experts, is to go on vacation. Sleep only when you’re tired and get up when you feel rested, and you’ll naturally settle close to your actual needs.

A few weeks ago, my alarm startled me awake at 2:46 A.M. I plodded to the kitchen, where I tried to make myself more alert by turning on some lamps. I’d organized a Zoom meeting with Osmond and two other short sleepers, at a time that they were typically awake but I wasn’t. Two of them had even joined the waiting room early.

Brad Johnson, a sixty-nine-year-old in Utah, had grown up in a family of five short sleepers and three normal sleepers. His mutation is associated with a neurotransmitter receptor found throughout the body, including in parts of the brain that are active during REM sleep and wakefulness. It was 1 A.M. where he was, and he was going to sleep soon.

Lynne White, an eighty-three-year-old in California, is the only short sleeper in her family. She has a mutation that, in lab mice, is associated with reduced non-REM sleep and more brain waves found in deep sleep. It was midnight where she was, and she was planning the rest of her evening.

The trio had never met, and they were curious about one another. Johnson asked how many hours the others usually slept. Osmond, in Chicago, was just waking up, having gone to sleep around 11 P.M. “I’ve been known to stay up, Brad, for three days,” White said, laughing.

Johnson used to sleep five hours, but lately he’s been needing about four and a half. He realized that he was a short sleeper at nineteen, during a two-year Mormon mission that had a bedtime of 10:30 P.M. “It was like asking me, ‘Why don’t you just be seven foot five by tomorrow?’ ” he told us. He recalled hiding in closets or bathrooms to read.

“Our brains never stop,” Osmond said. “No matter what we try to do. It just needs to be filled.”

“You just have to do things,” Johnson agreed. He used to worry that his sleep patterns were unhealthy—after all, he kept hearing that he was supposed to be sleeping much more. Learning about his genes has quieted those anxieties. These days, he’s a retired financial executive with eight children; he chairs a two-hundred-member choir and orchestra, volunteers for his church, and reads untold numbers of biographies. He’s also collecting all the talks and presentations that he’s given in the past fifty years.

Being awake so much can be an isolating experience. “There are times when I look outside and there isn’t a light on in any of the houses in my whole subdivision,” Osmond said. Whereas I might be frustrated by running out of time before bed, a short sleeper has to make sure she doesn’t run out of constructive tasks. (“I think one of my brothers died because he could not keep his mind busy and started to drink,” Osmond had told me previously.) Despite all of her volunteering, tutoring, working, parenting, and hobbying, she is always searching for new interests. In 2021, when Iceland’s volcanoes started to erupt for the first time in hundreds of years, she read everything she could find on geology. Then she got bored and moved on.

Johnson’s children are not short sleepers, but he has seventeen grandchildren, and one of them might be. “I’ll get up at five, and she’ll be up shortly thereafter,” he said. He asked Osmond and White about their families. “I think I annoyed my children,” White said. “I was always waking them up.” When her son was in college, he got up early for a job and found her already awake, reading the newspaper. “You know, I’ve never seen you in bed,” he told her.

I was groggy and enjoyed listening to them swap stories, so I chimed in only occasionally. Johnson and White said that they didn’t need to take painkillers after surgeries. White talked about volunteering to fix people’s devices as part of a club of Apple users.

I was still a little envious of short sleepers, but our conversation also served as a blunt reminder of how difficult it is to change one’s relationship to sleep. Johnson could no more make himself sleep through the night than I could get up every day for a 3 A.M. meeting. While they spoke, I thought about how nice it would be to get back into bed, and perhaps even to make up for lost time by sleeping in. There are some pleasures reserved for longer sleepers, I thought.

Had they squeezed more out of life in the time they’d had, I wondered? White said that, when she was younger, she’d needed the extra hours to run three real-estate companies and raise her children. She often organized her days by asking herself, What do I have left to do? Johnson had also felt a paradoxical time crunch. “I like to say that God knew I needed an extra three hours to keep up,” he said.

But all three said that, in retirement, their experience of time has evolved. White now finds herself asking a more expansive question: What am I going to do? “Joanne sort of inspires me,” she said, of Osmond. “She’s so productive.” Osmond brushed her off, pointing out how frequently White volunteers, and I felt relieved that even short sleepers are self-conscious about how they use their time.

I got the feeling that the trio were happy to have found one another. Before we ended the call, White confessed to a bit of envy of her own. “It sounds wonderful to have a family that you can relate to,” she told Johnson and Osmond. “I don’t have anybody.” She turned to me and joked, “I feel like you created a friendship group for me.”

“You can contact me anytime you want,” Osmond chimed in. “More than likely, I'll be awake.” ♦

In the spring of 1994, at a philosophy conference on a run-down modernist campus in the English Midlands, a group of academics, media theorists, artists, hackers, and d.j.s gathered to hear a young professor give a talk at a conference called “Virtual Futures.” It was ten o’clock in the morning, and most of the attendees were wiped out from a rave that had taken place in the student union the night before. But the talk—titled “Meltdown”—was highly anticipated. The professor, Nick Land, was tenured in the philosophy department at the University of Warwick, at the time one of the top philosophy programs in the U.K. Land had gained a cult following for his radical anti-humanism, his wild predictions about the future of technology, and his erratic teaching style. Soon, his academic presentations would become increasingly “experimental”; at a conference in 1996, he lay on the floor, reciting cut-up poetry in what an attendee described as a “demon voice” while jungle music played in the background. But that day he just stood up and started speaking, his thin frame twitching under an oversized black jumper, his voice soft and halting, slipping at times into a whisper. “The story goes like this,” he began:

Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization takeoff. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip.

At the time, few people had any idea what he was talking about. For most, Land’s prognostications were easily dismissed as the ramblings of a tech-addled Continental philosopher. By 1998, burnt out on stimulants and anticipating a Y2K apocalypse, Land had a breakdown, left academia, and dropped off the map.

A quarter of a century later, the world has changed. A.I. apocalypse no longer seems so far-fetched. Land’s visions of a technological revolution that abolishes the political order now appeal not to a marginalized, academic ultra-left but to the rising, Silicon Valley-aligned New Right. And Land, in recent years, has reëmerged as one of the most influential reactionary thinkers of our time. His thought has filtered into the highest levels of the tech world: Marc Andreessen, the founder of the behemoth venture-capital firm a16z, referred to Land as his “favorite philosopher,” and people who work in Silicon Valley told me that an increasing number of reading groups were featuring Land’s work. Land began to gain a new following in the early twenty-tens, when he became a key figure in “neo-reaction,” an intellectual movement that unfolded largely in the hinterlands of blogs and was a crossroads for the emerging strains of the online far right. In a long essay published online in 2012, he gave the movement a philosophical grounding and a catchy name: the Dark Enlightenment.

Like Curtis Yarvin and other neo-reactionaries, Land abhors democracy. Politics since the Enlightenment, he argues, is a story not of the advance of human freedom but of constant resource transfer from the productive to the unproductive—a world-historical tragedy of the commons that would eventually spell its own doom. Land’s main contribution to this discourse was to find a radically anti-human, science-fiction-inflected optimism in democracy’s end. He projected a future where the postwar order collapsed and uncontrollable digital superintelligence led to runaway economic growth, a rapid hierarchization of society, and the eventual rule of a transcendent force that he called “technocapital,” or, simply, “Intelligence.”

In 2008, the academic Benjamin Noys coined the word “accelerationism” to describe Land’s vision of capitalism as an unstoppable force and traditional politics as its enemy; the term was first taken up by leftists (who argued that unfettered technological progress would lead to a fully automated socialist utopia), and then by neo-Nazis (who imagined fomenting social breakdown through terrorism). By 2022, when the machine-learning revolution had entered full swing, some in Silicon Valley began to talk of “effective accelerationism” as they advocated removing any political or moral checks on technology. Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, posted, “You cannot out-accelerate me” on X; Andreessen published his widely shared “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” calling for “the conscious and deliberate propulsion of technological development . . . to ensure the techno-capital upward spiral continues forever.” In 1993, Land had described capitalism as “an invasion from the future” by an artificial intelligence that had come back in time to assemble itself from “enemy resources”—that is, mankind. Three decades later, many in Silicon Valley are starting to believe that superintelligence is on the horizon and approaching fast. If A.I. takeover is inevitable, then maybe resistance is futile. What if, instead of trying to stop it, you joined it?

“Increasingly, there are only two basic human types populating this planet,” Land wrote in 2013. “There are autistic nerds, who alone are capable of participating effectively in the advanced technological processes that characterize the emerging economy, and there is everybody else. For everybody else, this situation is uncomfortable.”

On a recent Tuesday night, about a hundred people gathered at a Mediterranean Revival mansion in San Francisco to celebrate Land’s arrival in the city from Shanghai, where he moved in the early two-thousands. It was clear which of the two basic human types most of the people in the room could be categorized into. David Holz, the founder of the image-generating A.I. program Midjourney, was the party’s host. Onstage, Land wore loose jeans and a dark, baggy sweater with holes in the cuffs; the thought occurred to me that it might very well be the same one from his Warwick days, when he was wont to describe himself as “a palsied mantis constructed from black jumpers and secondhand Sega circuitry, stalking the crumbling corridors of academe systematically extirpating all humanism.” Despite his avowed desire to turn himself into a Terminator, the human remains; Land is still, as his former students remember him, preternaturally polite.

This was his first public appearance in the U.S. since 2016, and he had been flown in by Richard Craib, the South African-born founder of Numerai, a hedge fund whose trades are made by A.I. The crowd skewed young and male, with long hair and sweatshirts or crewcuts and blue blazers; the women, for the most part, were either wearing miniskirts or caring for children.

Land had spent the week meeting with people in tech, and he was thrilled by what he had seen. “Everyone seems to be doing amazing things,” he said. (At Numerai, Craib told me, Land was particularly taken with the chief data officer, who was working full tilt to eliminate his own job and replace himself with A.I.) The last time Land had been in San Francisco was the mid-nineties, and the woke, nanny-state dystopia he remembered was gone, replaced by something like its opposite. The A.I. revolution wasn’t just about creating new software. This was “holy, holy, holy capitalism”: the final “breakout” of capital-“I,” nonhuman intelligence from the fetters of democratic containment.

Land has always been a controversial figure, but not for the same reasons he is now. In the nineties, at Warwick, he led the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, or C.C.R.U., a crew of graduate students, artists, and philosophers who saw in digital technology portents of revolution. Narrowly construed, cybernetics is the science behind digital computing, but the C.C.R.U. saw in it a vaster vision of self-regulating, auto-catalyzing processes. Computing, they argued, was not just a technology but the secret of the universe—the system underpinning genetics, market economics, thermodynamics. Burrowed in a sleepy university town, fuelled by amphetamines, rave music, and the end-of-history euphoria of the early internet, they hymned a future that would eventually lead to superintelligent A.I., societal collapse, and human extinction. “Monkey-flake”—that is, humanity—was mere grist for the coming machines. In thrall to visions of virtual apocalypse, Land soon saw his life fall apart. The C.C.R.U. lost its funding, and Land lost his job.

Other C.C.R.U. alumni—such as Mark Fisher, who became an influential critic of neoliberalism—eventually softened their stance, arguing that technology should be harnessed to build a more just and equitable future. But Land swerved hard to the right. In the nineties, he had told his students that the future would take place in China, and in the early two-thousands he surfaced in Shanghai, working as a journalist and travel-guide editor. He wrote articles in praise of the war on terror and posted about “flash-frying Islamofascists” in the comments sections of neoconservative blogs. In his earliest work, Land had advocated “feminist violence” and “the overthrowing of logic and patriarchy”; now he wanted to “squash democratic myths” and restructure governments as authoritarian city-states ruled by computers.

Land’s vision shares much with that of Yarvin, whom he describes as a “hero” and whose writings were the subject of Land’s Dark Enlightenment essay. Yarvin’s blueprint for a post-democratic future centers on the idea that states should be reconstituted as businesses—or, as he calls them, “sovcorps.” Yarvin was there that Tuesday night, making a much anticipated appearance. As the ballroom filled up, he walked in, wearing a natty tweed jacket and sunglasses. That evening was the first time that the two titans of neoreactionary thought would meet, and yet, when Yarvin joined Land on the stage, they didn’t seem to have much to say to each other. Yarvin tends to extreme digression, while Land speaks with the allusive compression of a guru. The conversation struggled to get traction. Was A.I. accelerating or slowing down? Would we all become managers of our own L.L.M. armies? As Yarvin free-associated on Venezuela, the resource curse, and the future of graphic designers (verdict: not looking good), Land waited patiently, seeming a little bored. Yarvin speculated that, after all jobs had been automated, perhaps people could make money selling their organs. “But our new robot overlords do not need human organs,” Land reminded him, before opening the floor.

Once upon a time, the attendees of an event like the one that took place the other week might have shied away from being associated with a figure like Land, but that night there was no sense of scandal or secrecy. The event had been organized by a man named Wolf Tivy, the founder of a futurist magazine rumored to be funded by the libertarian entrepreneur Peter Thiel. (Tivy declined to confirm Thiel as a funding source, and said the magazine’s funding is now entirely subscriber-based.) “Five years ago, I would have said, ‘Get the fuck out,’ ” Tivy responded when I told him I was writing for The New Yorker. “Now everything’s different.”

Tivy is right. In February, 2020, as the COVID pandemic loomed, I attended an event for Yarvin in Los Angeles, hosted by the podcaster Justin Murphy at a defunct veterans’ lodge in a gentrifying neighborhood. At that point, Murphy had recently quit academia to pursue podcasts, and had rented an Airbnb in the hopes of creating “a TikTok hype house for dissident intellectuals.” The event was Yarvin’s first public appearance since 2016, when other participants withdrew from a tech conference he was speaking at because of his advocacy of monarchism. “There is a huge demand for this—true radical, dangerous intellectual thought and discussion,” Murphy said, when introducing him. As attendees chatted over pizza and Jack Daniel’s, Thiel slipped in through the back door, joining the hipsters on folding chairs. “D.I.Y., baby, punk rock,” Murphy said. “Get a venue where you live, put on things like this. The institutions aren’t gonna do it for you.”

Six years later, Yarvin is openly fêted by tech founders and cited as an influence by the Vice-President. Land can now hold court in the ballroom of a mansion where sushi and seltzer are being served. Clearly, these ideas, and the political energy they carry, have escaped containment. But now, having spread, the new reactionary thought seems to have lost some of its momentum. “Nobody knows where we’re going,” Yarvin said, on the stage. Land agreed, adding, “I think the thing is that muddling through is the world that we are now living in.”

Afterward, I found Murphy chatting with a group outside. He seemed almost shocked by Land and Yarvin’s conversation. “They sounded like old fogeys,” he said, while smoking tobacco from a pipe. “We’ll remember this night as proof that the Dark Enlightenment is over. Think about what’s happened since then. Machine intelligence has been solved, woke is over, Trump is back, crypto is institutionalized. Everyone is still in this besieged mentality, but the bars have been lifted.”

Land’s writings from the nineties have a seductive danger, envisioning a sci-fi future of synthetic drugs, black-market brain implants, gene editing, and cyborgs. At that time, a world of true digital immersion was still decades away; like William Gibson, who wrote the eighties cyberpunk classic “Neuromancer” on a typewriter, Land, in his C.C.R.U. heyday, had a green-screen Amstrad computer, and was barely connected to the internet. But now a version of Land’s midnight future has arrived. While real-world infrastructure is left to rot, A.I. build-out floats the economy, accounting, as of 2025, for almost forty per cent of U.S. G.D.P. growth. And many of the fantasies that powered the online right during the mid-twenty-tens have become official policy under the second Trump Administration. The President hired the world’s wealthiest tech mogul to dismantle the government. The Department of Homeland Security posts deportation videos on TikTok that resemble the “fashwave” fan edits once spread on meme accounts inspired by Land and Yarvin. Out-of-control A.I. is not a fiction imagined by novelists but a reality financed by venture capitalists and sovereign wealth funds. And you no longer have to go to the deepest crypts of the web to find Land: in October, on an episode of Tucker Carlson’s show seen by millions, Carlson and the self-described amateur theologian Conrad Flynn discussed Land’s ideas about A.I. for close to half an hour. “We are building the demons from the Book of Revelation with A.I.,” Flynn explained, summarizing Land. “That’s Nick’s Land’s position?” Carlson asked. “It’s the position of a lot of these guys,” Flynn replied.

Late in the evening, after Land’s conversation with Yarvin, a procession followed Land onto a deck overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The group’s average age could not have been much older than twenty-five. Many mentioned working for various A.I. majors—OpenAI, Anthropic, Midjourney. Everyone sat down around a fire pit, except for Land, who stood, face lit from below, gesturing and swaying. The crowd was admiring, even starstruck, but their questions did not suggest particularly right-wing sympathies. The conversation had the tenor of a campfire chat you have when you’re young and stoned—questions about the universe and human destiny, discussed in the vaguest possible terms. Unlike most such conversations, though, this one was conducted by people whose actions may very well determine the course of history. I was struck by how unsure these tech workers seemed of the world they were building. They looked to Land as a prophet; now that his vision was coming true, they wanted to know what was next.

Despite the about-face in Land’s political alignment between his C.C.R.U. and Dark Enlightenment years, what has remained the same is a scorn for the things our species holds dear. “Nothing human makes it out of the near future,” he proclaimed in “Meltdown,” the talk from 1994, which has since become legendary. As the night wore on, the line kept coming up. If humanity is doomed, someone asked—as Yarvin’s baby started crying—what is the point of politics? What is the point, someone else asked him, of having children? (Land has two, college-age kids who he doesn’t think have read his work.)

At the fire pit, the musician Grimes sat beside Land. Grimes has long engaged with accelerationist ideas in her music, and she has three children with Elon Musk, whom Steve Bannon has called “one of the top accelerationists.”(After the party, Musk wrote on X that he “unfortunately missed” the event.) Her song “We Appreciate Power” includes the lyrics “Pledge allegiance to the world’s most powerful computer / Simulation, it’s the future,” and she has also created an open-source A.I. platform for generating music with her voice. But that night she seemed to hesitate. What will happen, she asked Land, when A.I. becomes self-improving, and humans get locked out of the loop of their development? Can the machines be oriented toward human ends, or will A.I. simply eat the universe? “I feel an incredible urge to make it stop and see beauty more,” she said.

Land’s reply took a predictable form. The true engine of history, he explained, is the feedback loop between commerce and technology, money and power. Human desire is just a vessel, worked from the outside toward ends we cannot control. History has a destination, but it is not for humans. “My prediction is that A.I. will persuade you that technology eating the universe is more beautiful,” he said. ♦

On the afternoon of April 15, 1994, Donald Ewing and Doniel Quinn were in an idling car in Kansas City, Kansas, when a man dressed in black opened fire with a shotgun, killing them both. Ruby Mitchell saw the shooting from her house and told police that the killer looked like her niece’s boyfriend, Lamont. Lamont was reportedly out of town, but Detective Roger Golubski’s investigation quickly zeroed in on someone with a similar name: Lamonte McIntyre, who was seventeen. (A transcript of the interview police conducted with Mitchell on the day of the killings shows her naming “Lamont McIntyre” as the man she saw, but Mitchell insisted, years later, that she did not know McIntyre, and had not given the police his name.) Golubski, who would go on to helm the Kansas City, Kansas Police Department’s homicide unit, had a reputation for closing cases quickly. This one was settled even more swiftly than most. Mitchell picked McIntyre’s face out of a photo lineup; six hours after the shots were fired, McIntyre was under arrest. During the murder trial, that fall, another witness also identified him as the shooter, and Golubski claimed that “confidential informants” and “street talk” further confirmed the teen-ager’s guilt. Throughout, McIntyre proclaimed his innocence. He was convicted and given two consecutive life sentences. “God and I weren’t speaking for a while,” McIntyre later said.

McIntyre’s case eventually came to the attention of Cheryl Pilate, a Kansas City attorney who worked with Centurion Ministries, a nonprofit that investigates incarcerated people’s claims of innocence. Glancing at the files, Pilate saw a police investigation that seemed flawed and incomplete. McIntyre had no apparent connection to the victims. He didn’t resemble the Lamont that Mitchell had initially identified. The photo lineup had included only five photographs instead of the typical six, and three of the people pictured were related. No physical evidence tied him to the scene, and witnesses placed him at a relative’s house at the time of the shooting. McIntyre’s court-appointed attorney was on probation for legal misconduct at the time of his trial and was disbarred in 1998 (a decision unrelated to McIntyre’s case). The court-appointed lawyer who had handled McIntyre’s post-conviction petition was also disbarred for misconduct. The prosecutor, Terra Morehead, was previously in a relationship with the judge, a fact that was not disclosed at trial. Pilate’s initial conclusion was that McIntyre’s case looked “not real difficult,” she told me last year.

But exonerating McIntyre turned out to be much more complicated than Pilate realized at first, in part because of what it revealed about Kansas City’s criminal-justice system. The circumstances of McIntyre’s wrongful conviction, and the years of work it took to get him free, are the subject of the investigative journalist Rick Tulsky’s comprehensive and sobering new book, “Injustice Town: A Corrupt City, a Wrongly Convicted Man, and a Struggle for Freedom.” Since the founding of the Innocence Project, in 1992, which uses DNA evidence to overturn convictions, exoneration stories have become a familiar genre. The organization has contributed to the release of more than two hundred and fifty people; Centurion, which specializes in cases without DNA evidence, which tend to be more challenging, credits itself with seventy. McIntyre’s story is no less affecting for not being unique: Tulsky details McIntyre’s naïve certainty that the truth would come out during his trial, his alternation between hope and despair as his case went through the legal system, and the many obstacles before his eventual exoneration, in 2017.

The story of McIntyre’s time in prison is interwoven with that of the legal work done on his behalf. Rosie McIntyre, his mother, did some digging of her own, with help from a private investigator whom she found in a phone book. Doniel Quinn’s relatives, convinced that McIntyre wasn’t the culprit, joined the effort. Eyewitnesses said that Morehead, the prosecutor, had pressured them into testifying. (Morehead surrendered her license and was disbarred in 2024, owing to a career-long pattern of misconduct.) Eventually, a more likely account of the crime emerged. Quinn was the doorman at a nearby dope house where, shortly before the murders, drugs were stolen. The shooting seems to have been a retaliation for the theft. Centurion’s investigation pinpointed another local teen-ager, known by the nickname Monster, as the gunman. (He has denied involvement in the murders.) Jim McCloskey, Centurion’s founder, managed to arrange a prison interview with a notorious Kansas City drug kingpin named Cecil Brooks, who was rumored to have ordered the hit on Quinn. “Your man didn’t do it,” Brooks told McCloskey, naming Monster as the shooter. “Maybe we should have stepped up and did something, but that wasn’t how it worked,” Brooks added.

Kansas, the hub of John Brown’s militant abolitionist activism, once had a reputation among Black Americans as a kind of promised land; those who flocked there from the South, after the failure of Reconstruction, were known as Exodusters. By the early nineteen-nineties, that optimism had eroded. Kansas City, Kansas—widely known as K.C.K., to distinguish it from its wealthier, larger sister city across the river, in Missouri—was hit particularly hard by the crack-cocaine epidemic. Wyandotte County, the county that contains K.C.K., had among the highest rates of unemployment and lowest median incomes in the state. Crime rates were nearly double the Kansas average; in a city of a hundred and fifty thousand people, Quinn and Ewing’s murders were the fifth shooting in three days.

Local politics were insular and marred by accusations of corruption, with the K.C.K. Police Department reputed to be particularly unscrupulous. An F.B.I. agent investigating a cocaine ring in the early nineties blamed the extent of the city’s drug problem on “corruption with the police department and general investigative incompetence.” Civil-rights violations, including “severe beatings,” were “routine,” he noted in an internal memo; when he tried to get copies of complaints against officers, he was told that the department regularly destroyed them. “The KCKPD does not investigate civil right violations against its officers any more than it investigates allegations of drug dealing or robberies committed by officers,” he wrote.

None of this will be shocking to anyone who’s lived in an American city crippled by disinvestment and self-dealing—or even to anyone who’s watched a David Simon show on HBO. Even so, having it all laid out is bracing, and Tulsky’s book makes for a worthy entry in the canon of American injustice. Beyond individual bad actors, there is a system with many flawed elements, including the fact that Wyandotte County was the rare urban jurisdiction that, until recently, didn’t have a public defender’s office. But, parallel to the standard story of corruption and false imprisonment, another narrative emerges from “Injustice Town,” one that never fully comes to the forefront.

Centurion took up McIntyre’s case in 2009, and Pilate was tasked with investigating the case and putting together the legal documents petitioning for his release. The work, which was initially supposed to be completed in a year or two, took much longer than expected. “Injustice Town” has a light touch with its do-gooders, but it’s clear that the delay frustrated McCloskey, Centurion’s founder, and weighed heavily on McIntyre, who had spent more than half his life behind bars. The delays occurred, in part, because Pilate had become preoccupied with amassing evidence about Roger Golubski that was beyond the scope of McIntyre’s case. Born into a working-class family, Golubski was a heavyset man who had considered becoming a priest before entering the police force. Among his colleagues, he was known to be well sourced, with an extensive network of confidential informants who helped him close cases. Among Black residents of the neighborhoods Golubski patrolled, he had a different reputation.

Ophelia Williams encountered Golubski in 1999, when he was investigating her twin sons for murder. According to Williams, while Golubski was at her home, he put his hand on her leg. She slapped it away. He told her he was friends with the D.A. and might be able to help her sons, and then put his hand up her skirt. Then he raped her. Golubski would return and assault Williams several more times in the following months. Usually, he was on duty, driving his official vehicle. On two occasions, he was particularly rushed; he told her that his partner was waiting in the squad car outside. Williams didn’t report him at the time. “He was the police,” she said later. “What was I going to say; this policeman just raped me?”

Compared with the extensive coverage of police violence in recent years, there’s been relatively little discussion of sexual exploitation by law enforcement. In 2015, the Associated Press published a report that said nearly a thousand police officers in the U.S. lost their licenses as a result of sexual misconduct between 2009 and 2014—a figure that represented a “sure undercount,” the report noted, since nine states, including New York and California, didn’t keep relevant records. Women engaging in drug use and sex work are particularly vulnerable. When researchers recruited three hundred and eighteen women from St. Louis drug courts for a study on H.I.V. intervention, seventy-eight of them disclosed having experienced police sexual misconduct, defined by some researchers as a “sexually degrading, humiliating, violating, damaging, or threatening act committed by a police officer through the use of force or police authority.” Of more than three hundred sex workers in Baltimore interviewed for a 2023 study, roughly a third reported recent sex with police, including situations that ranged from paid sex work to implicit or explicitly coercive encounters and violent assaults. In some instances, the interaction may have a veneer of consent, or of quid pro quo. (In the Baltimore study, a number of women said that they were pressured into sex as a way to avoid arrest; forty-four per cent of them were arrested anyway.) Victims are not exclusively female: in 2015, a Florida officer pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting undocumented men while on duty. Numerous officers fired for sex offenses have been hired elsewhere and continued to work in law enforcement, sometimes re-offending, according to the A.P. In 2023, the Department of Justice established the first nationwide database documenting instances of police misconduct. On the first day of the second Trump Administration, it was eliminated.

Pilate’s sources told her that Golubski frequented sex workers in his patrol area while on duty, stole drugs from dealers and provided them to women in exchange for sex, and was reputed to have had multiple children with women in the area. The confidential informants who helped him close cases so swiftly included women he had sexual relationships with, some of whom were addicted to drugs. He threatened to arrest women if they refused sex. Golubski’s predatory behavior seemed to have been not so much an open secret as just open. Ruby Ellington, the first Black woman to work as a police officer in K.C.K., was in the same police-academy class as Golubski. In a 2015 affidavit, she said that Golubski used his badge as “leverage to get what he wanted,” and that his exploitation of Black women was “no secret”: “Everyone in the Department knew that when Golubski would go out on calls, that any black female involved would likely end up in his police car with him.” Several other officers shared similar stories; one Black officer said that the higher-ups thought that Golubski’s predilections were “funny.” (Golubski’s superiors admitted to knowing something about what one described as his “affinity” for Black women, but denied knowledge of rampant sexual exploitation, and said that there were no complaints filed against him.)

Sexual exploitation appears to have been fundamental to how Golubski practiced law enforcement. During the brief investigation that resulted in McIntyre’s wrongful conviction and imprisonment, Golubski asked one of the victim’s mothers if she dated white men, made lewd comments to a witness, and requested that another witness dance for him. Pilate had wondered why an eyewitness named Stacey Quinn had never been interviewed. She learned that, according to the Quinn family, Stacey had been in a years-long sexually exploitative relationship with Golubski that began when she was a teen-ager. Rosie, McIntyre’s mother, also had a history with the detective. According to Rosie, a few years before her son’s arrest, Golubski had threatened to file charges against her boyfriend unless she met him at the police station. When she did, he sexually assaulted her in the detectives’ room. Afterward, he called her repeatedly until she changed her number. She wondered whether her rejection was one reason the investigation had targeted her son.

The arc of a wrongful-conviction story bends toward exoneration and release—a flawed but heartening correction of past wrongs. Stories of police sexual abuse, laced with stigma and rarely so redemptive, are harder to hear. In “Injustice Town,” they remain in the background, more evidence of endemic malfeasance. But the sexual exploitation practiced by Golubski—and, according to several victims, by other officers as well—was central to his corruption, not a by-product of it. Such actions are possible only within a culture that resists seeing certain categories of people—Black women, poor women, sex workers, drug addicts—as potential victims. In the guise of offering a form of protection, Golubski coöpted women into becoming instruments of the criminal-justice apparatus that corroded their community.

In 2010, Golubski, who had reached the rank of captain, retired from the K.C.K. police force in good standing. A few years later, his former partner became the city’s chief of police. Even after McIntyre’s exoneration made the accusations against Golubski widely known, it seemed as though he might never face consequences; he was still receiving his full pension and working for a nearby police department, in the suburb where he lived. When McIntyre filed a civil suit against Wyandotte County, a judge ordered settlement talks, fearing that a hefty jury verdict might bankrupt the struggling county. McIntyre came away with a $12.5 million payout, but neither the police department nor Golubski was required to admit culpability. (In a statement, Wyandotte County’s legal counsel said that, “at the time the alleged conduct is said to have occurred, none of the former Chiefs had knowledge of these allegations.”)

Then, in 2022, the Department of Justice charged Golubski with six counts of depriving two individuals (named in the indictment as S.K. and O.W., who was identified as Ophelia Williams) of their civil rights, through sexual assault, kidnapping, and attempted kidnapping. Prosecutors, in detailing the assaults against Williams and S.K.—who was around thirteen or fourteen at the time of her first encounter with the detective—argued for Golubski’s detention while awaiting trial. They failed, and instead he was released on house arrest. A second indictment against Golubski was released later that year. In it, Golubski was charged with conspiracy and involuntary servitude, stemming from a sex-trafficking enterprise run by Cecil Brooks, the K.C.K. drug kingpin. (Brooks was also, at one point, an informant for the D.E.A.) According to prosecutors, Brooks held girls as young as thirteen, many of whom had been released from juvenile detention, in apartments he owned, where they were forced to perform sex acts. (Brooks, who was indicted along with Golubski, has pleaded not guilty.) The indictment said that Golubksi protected the sex-trafficking operation from law enforcement and assaulted girls who were ensnared in it. “We tried many times to bust Cecil Brooks and bring charges against him,” Ellington, the former K.C.K. detective, said, in her 2015 affidavit. “During the years I worked in vice and narcotics at the Department, we used informants, we attempted controlled buys, and we obtained search warrants. But we never were successful. Whenever we got there, Brooks was always clean.”

On December 2, 2024, the day Golubski was finally scheduled to stand trial for the civil-rights violations, he got in his red Ford Taurus and headed toward the federal courthouse in Topeka. His police badges were still stored in the car’s center console. Before he reached the highway, he turned around and returned home. Around 9 A.M., he walked onto his back deck and shot himself in the head. Some K.C.K. officials seemed to be eager to move on. “I can tell you from talking to all the members on the police department, his name doesn’t come up,” the new police chief said, after taking office in 2021. Golubski’s victims were left at a loss. Although he left multiple suicide notes, rumors circulated that someone else had killed him, or that he wasn’t really dead. “My first thought was, Where is the body? I want to see the body,” Williams told a reporter. It was as if the spectre of something still lingered in the city, shadowy and unresolved. ♦